What is an integrated mind?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question (Q): What is an integrated mind?

Acharya Prashant (AP): The integrated individual. The title itself says education integration. The words integration or disintegration were mentioned by you not less than six or eight times, do you recall? Let’s begin with that. What is meant by integration and why should we say education and integration. Is the relationship between these two?

Listeners (L): Yes

AP: Please tell.

L: When you concentrate and then try to share your knowledge and try to improve the other person then you get integrated with the other person.

AP: In the very first paragraph the author talks of unspeakable sorrow. Unspeakable sorrow. What is this unspeakable sorrow? All sorrow, all suffering is the suffering of being divided. Let us look at ourselves or let us look at our students, and the very obvious truth of this will come to us. What does my student say? I wanted another department and I did not get it. I wanted an NIT or an IIT, I did not get it. The mind is divided between this and that, and simply put, this is this integration.

To be integrated is to be one, and to be disintegrated is to be divided. Not completely in, not completely out. Not completely here, not completely there. Not joyful, not hopeless either. And the division is not merely two-fold. It’s not as if one’s mind is divided in two. The mind is divided into 20,000 parts. Each part runs in a separate direction. And that is conflict, that is violence that is what the speaker refers to as the unspeakable sorrow. Because from the divided mind of the individual results divided relationships, divided societies, ultimately a divided world. And everything is just bits and pieces. That’s the pain, right?

Suppose you are sitting here, and you’re not completely here. Do you understand the agony of that, the sheer sorrow of that? Why should I move from that platform to this place, so that I can be, fully with you? And that alone can be peaceful. That is integration. Are we getting this? Being here, yet not being here, would be sorrow.

Now, what is education doing? Is it helping me as a teacher and the student be…